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This essay is a very belated response to a " part 1 " published in February 2015. The gist of that essay was a response to a corre...

Friday, December 4, 2015

MYTHCOMICS: THE NEW GODS SAGA (1971-72 / 1984)

…the gods are ever near—a part of men’s lives!! Giant
reflections of the good and evil that men generate within themselves! —Orion,
NEW GODS #10, 1972.

In my attempt to create a serious novel for our medium, I
have chosen that most basic of experiences, one we have all shared at one time
or another—survival! I have taken this innate response to danger, and have
portrayed it in mythological terms.—Jack Kirby, “Kirby on Survival,” NEW GODS
(vol. 2?), #6 (1984).

A handful of comics-artists working during the 1960s took special notice of the
success of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Middle-Earth” works-- not least among them Jack Kirby, one of the founding talents of the medium. Though the most famous work in Tolkien's fantasy-cycle was published in the 1950s, THE LORD OF THE RINGS did not achieve best-seller
status in America until the mid-1960s, when the trilogy was re-packaged into paperback-book
format by Ballantine Books.

American comic books had been mining the themes of mythic good vs. mythic evil for many years prior
to Tolkien's rise to international fame. So even though comics-professionals—including
Kirby—might not have specifically pursued Tolkien’s themes, some comics-pros sought to find out if comic books could also follow in Tolkien's successful footsteps by creating a “secondary world” with a mythology-derived basis.

I cannot, in one blogpost, cover the complexity of Jack
Kirby’s “Fourth World” concept—a tetralogy of sorts, which extended over four regularly published
comics-titles—nor the business-based complications attending the epic’s cancellation in 1972
and its resumption in 1984. I also won't touch on three of
the books that contributed to the epic tale: FOREVER PEOPLE, MISTER MIRACLE, and JIMMY OLSEN. The
strongest mythic discourse of Kirby’s tetralogy appeared in the title NEW GODS, so that is my subject here. This comic-book epic is comprised of eleven
stories published in the early 1970s, and two stories published in 1984: a new 48-page story that appeared as part of a reprint collection and a softbound graphic novel, THE
HUNGER DOGS.

No one living knows how Kirby might have concluded NEW GODS in 1972 had he been given the chance to do so, or whether that conclusion would have strongly resembled the one he wrote and drew for the 1984 resumption. But the delay may have been
fortunate. In the days of newsstand comics, it was rare to see any series
conclude on a definite and coherent end-point. American comic books were
designed to be indefinitely open-ended, and when a comic proved unsuccessful,
the feature simply ended, usually with no effort at a send-off, much less a
resolution. Many critics have sneered at the open-ended approach on aesthetic
grounds, but it engendered a creative response that had its own peculiar power.
Comics-professionals had to be peripatetic creators, constantly shifting from
one bizarre image or motif to another, always with the aim of capturing the
short attention span of juvenile readers. Jack Kirby was an early master of the
peripatetic mode, possibly the most accomplished of his generation, in that he
excelled in almost every genre popular in newsstand comics: war, crime,
superheroes, science fiction, and even romantic tales.

But though the peripatetic mode allowed for great fluidity
of myth-concepts, it didn’t allow for much coherence, except for what one could
expect from a self-contained short story. I’ve cited examples of Kirby co-creations that managed
to consummate their mythic discourses, here and here for example, while others,
like this one and this one, were not so successful. In Kirby’s mind, he may
have been creating a “serious novel,” but he had to frame it in terms that the
market would recognize.

Because of these market considerations, most of the stories in the NEW GODS mythos, the ones published in 1971-72, have been accurately critiqued for its rambling plots and
problematic characterizations. Both of these circumstances were the result of long-standing creative habits
Kirby had developed in his thirty years as a professional.

But where NEW GODS excels is in Kirby’s take on a theme that
Tolkien himself had evoked. In a world where mythic good and mythic evil have
palpable existence, and where their battle is the proper working-out of their
joint destiny, how does good keep from becoming corrupted by the power of evil?

The book’s hero Orion embodies this conflict. Long before
his birth, a major war erupts between the gods of good, who live on the vernal
planet New Genesis...

...and the gods of evil, who dwell within the dark Satanic
mills of Apokolips.

Darkseid, a Machiavellian plotter who eventually becomes
supreme ruler of Apokolips, engineers his world’s war with New Genesis—and then
belatedly realizes that he stands to lose as much as his opposite number, Highfather
of New Genesis. Highfather comes up with a way to end the conflict: the two
leaders exchange their children as what Kirby calls “war hostages.”

Thus Scott
Free, the genial son of Highfather, is brought up in the infernal domain of
Darkseid, while Orion, who inherits a savage disposition from his father and
mother, is raised among beings who strive to rise about hate and violence.
Scott Free eventually flees Apokolips and takes refuige on Earth, where he
becomes the costumed hero Mister Miracle. However, the plotlines of his feature have only an indirect influence upon the NEW GODS continuity. NEW GODS focuses upon Orion, who suspects from
childhood that he is the spawn of evil, though only during the renewed god-war
does he learn that he is the spawn of Apokolips’ ruler.

On top of all that, the new war descends to the mortal world
of Earth, for Darkseid has discovered a new means to exert his dominion: “the
anti-life equation,” a quasi-mystical mental power that dwells within the
brains of certain Earthpeople. Darkseid pursues a variety of strategies to
detect the hidden power, and Orion seeks to stop him.

Yet, though the anti-life equation is a strong parallel to
that of Tolkien’s One Ring, Kirby’s conclusion is quite different. The equation
is something of a “McGuffin” sought by both good and evil powers, and it does
not influence the struggle between Orion and his father. Indeed the equation is
barely mentioned in Kirby’s long-delayed conclusion of his epic. Significantly,
the evil of Apokolips is unable to conquer the good within Scott Free, in
contrast to the way the Ring overmasters Frodo at the conclusion of LORD OF THE
RINGS. Yet though Orion is tormented by his alienation from the pacific
gentleness of New Genesis, he becomes the right hand of his new father and
repeatedly renounces the old. Ironically, though Darkseid spawns Orion upon a
wife forced on him by political considerations, and another son, the brutal
Kalibak, upon a woman he Darkseid actually cherishes, Darkseid regards Kalibak
as no more than a useful tool, and in issue #11 he flies into a fatherly rage when one of his
aides, without his permission, almost kills Orion.

The 1984 story from NEW GODS #6 concludes in an
anti-climactic manner compared to most good/evil battles in comic books. The
final battle between Orion and Darkseid is foregrounded from the very first,
but instead of Orion obtaining a martial victory, Darkseid springs a trap and
apparently slays Orion. Yet the hero’s body disappears from sight, and the
story concludes with a caption observing: “Who among us can convince the evil?
Unmoved by guilt, they forever live with doubt!” Kirby’s phraseology is
awkward, but it communicates a salient message: that the evil are not blessed
by their lack of guilt, but that doubt, the perpetual fear of external
retribution, takes the place of guilt’s internal monitoring.

HUNGER DOGS, though it suffers from various narrative
problems, follows through on the theme of good finding a way to survive evil’s
depredations. Some time after Orion’s apparent death, Darkseid manages to
infect New Genesis with a species of “toxic rot.” Apokolips’ technology enters
the computer age, and even Darkseid himself is flummoxed by the innovations of
the artificial intelligence “Micro-Mark” (not one of Kirby’s better cognomens).
Darkseid feels misgivings at the over-mechanization of his infernal domain, and
he fears being superseded by “the voice of a pygmy—too small for the eye to
see.”

Orion storms Darkseid’s redoubt and destroys the Micro-Mark before it can
discover the anti-life equation, but it’s Highfather on New Genesis who most
decisively checkmates Darkseid’s technological superiority. Instead of
assailing Apokolips itself, Highfather and all of his godly kindred flee their
world in a flying city, just before the planet of New Genesis blows up. The planet’s
detonation sparks a revolt from the underclass of Apokolips—the “Hunger Dogs”
of the title-- and in the confusion, Orion is able to free his mother from
Darkseid’s prison, and to escape Apokolips with both his mother and his newly
introduced girlfriend Bekka. It’s stated that Darkseid will eventually quell
the revolution, but that now, without the “sister planet” of New Genesis to
bedevil, the overlord has become confined to his own “self-made prison of
suspicion, hate and murder.” In contrast, the denizens of New Genesis survive
on their own terms, pursuing a new destiny free of their evil mirror-image.

This summary does not by any means exhaust the many
myth-motifs containing in the NEW GODS continuity. But it should be evident
that even if Jack Kirby did not create anything like a “serious novel,” he
nonetheless articulated a masterpiece of modern myth.